Now published by Oxford University Press, Constructing the American Past: A Source Book of a People's History, Eighth Edition, presents an innovative combination of case studies and primary source documents that allow students to discover, analyze, and construct history from the actors' perspective. Beginning with Christopher Columbus and his interaction with the Spanish crown in 1492, and ending in the Reconstruction-era United States, Constructing the American Past provides eyewitness accounts of historical events, legal documents that helped shape the lives of citizens, and excerpts from diaries that show history through an intimate perspective. The authors expand upon past scholarship and include new material regarding gender, race, and immigration in order to provide a more complete picture of the past.
The 8th edition of Constructing the American Past presents an innovative combination of case studies and primary source documents from the 15th to the 19th century for readers to discover what life was like in the past. These case studies and documents allow the reader to discover, analyze, and construct history from the actors' perspective. Beginning with Christopher Columbus and his interaction with the Spanish crown in 1492, and ending in the Reconstruction era United States, Constructing the American Past provides eyewitness accounts of historical events, legal documents which helped shape the lives of citizens past, and excerpts from diaries which show history through an intimate perspective. The authors expand upon past scholarship and include new material regarding gender, race, and immigration in order to provide a more complete picture of the past.
Now published by Oxford University Press, Constructing the American Past: A Source Book of a People's History, Eighth Edition, presents an innovative combination of case studies and primary source documents that allow students to discover, analyze, and construct history from the actors' perspective. Beginning with Christopher Columbus and his interaction with the Spanish crown in 1492, and ending in the Reconstruction-era United States, Constructing the American Past provides eyewitness accounts of historical events, legal documents that helped shape the lives of citizens, and excerpts from diaries that show history through an intimate perspective. The authors expand upon past scholarship and include new material regarding gender, race, and immigration in order to provide a more complete picture of the past.
"What was it like back then? What did people think and believe? What motivated them to laugh and cry, fight and die? How did people live? Were their homes comfortable? Were their workdays long? Were their diets sufficient? How did they worship, if at all? These questions, and hundreds more, surface instantly when historians and students ponder the past. Indeed, the question "What was it like back then?" is fundamental to any person with a sense of curiosity. It also lies at the core of the historical profession. Using a wide range of sources, historians try to "construct" what life was like in the past. The process of construction is challenging. Since the sources needed to answer any important historical question are frequently incomplete, contradictory, or evasive, the writing of history can never be as precise as we would like. Imagine putting together a picture puzzle that is supposed to contain 1,000 pieces, but half of them have been lost. With effort and imagination, you might be able to reconstruct the general outlines of the picture. The process is roughly akin to historical inquiry. Hard work, analytical ability, and imagination-these come into play in both ventures"--
A spectacular example of collective protest, the Great Strike of 1877--actually a sequence of related actions--was America's first national strike and the first major strike against the railroad industry. In some places, non-railroad workers also abandoned city businesses, creating one of the nation's first general strikes. Mobilizing hundreds of thousands of workers, the Great Strikes of 1877 transformed the nation's political landscape, shifting the primary political focus from Reconstruction to labor, capital, and the changing role of the state. Probing essays by distinguished historians explore the social, political, regional, and ethnic landscape of the Great Strikes of 1877: long-term effects on state militias and national guard units; ethnic and class characterization of strikers; pictorial representations of poor laborers in the press; organizational strategies employed by railroad workers; participation by blacks; violence against Chinese immigrants; and the developing tension between capitalism and racial equality in the United States. Contributors: Joshua Brown, Steven J. Hoffman, Michael Kazin, David Miller, Richard Schneirov, David O. Stowell, and Shelton Stromquist.
Writing the American Past reproduces dozens of untranscribed, handwritten documents, offering students the opportunity to transcribe, decipher, and interpret primary sources. Documents include diary entries from Massachusetts in the 1690s, a woman detailing the Great Awakening, an eighteenth-century treaty with Native Americans, a journal describing antebellum train travel, and a letter by a slave Skillfully teaches students to engage with the raw material of pre-1877 US history: the written document An introduction and headnotes to each document contextualize the sources and provide a foundation from which the student can explore the material
The Primary Sources Edition of America Past and Present integrates the social and political dimensions of American history into one rich chronological narrative and includes 2 to 3 primary sources per chapter with critical thinking questions for each source. Writing in a lively narrative style to tell the story of all Americans-elite and ordinary, women and men, rich and poor, white majority and minorities-the authors, six active, publishing, and award-winning historians, bring history to life for introductory students.
"I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass The American Yawp is a free, online, collaboratively built American history textbook. Over 300 historians joined together to create the book they wanted for their own students—an accessible, synthetic narrative that reflects the best of recent historical scholarship and provides a jumping-off point for discussions in the U.S. history classroom and beyond. Long before Whitman and long after, Americans have sung something collectively amid the deafening roar of their many individual voices. The Yawp highlights the dynamism and conflict inherent in the history of the United States, while also looking for the common threads that help us make sense of the past. Without losing sight of politics and power, The American Yawp incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. The fully peer-reviewed edition of The American Yawp will be available in two print volumes designed for the U.S. history survey. Volume I begins with the indigenous people who called the Americas home before chronicling the collision of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans.The American Yawp traces the development of colonial society in the context of the larger Atlantic World and investigates the origins and ruptures of slavery, the American Revolution, and the new nation's development and rebirth through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Rather than asserting a fixed narrative of American progress, The American Yawp gives students a starting point for asking their own questions about how the past informs the problems and opportunities that we confront today.
